少年派的奇幻漂流 Chapter 59

Chapter 59,Alone or not, lost or not, I was thirsty and hungry. I pulled on the rope. There was a slight tension. As soon as I lessened ¹ my grip on it, it slid out, and the distance between the lifeboat and the raft increased. So the lifeboat drifted faster than the raft, pulling it along. I noted ² the fact without thinking anything of it. My mind was more focused on the doings of Richard Parker.,By the looks of it, he was under the tarpaulin ³.,I pulled the rope till I was right next to the bow. I reached up to the gunnel. As I was crouched ⁴, preparing myself for a quick raid on the locker ⁵, a series of waves got me thinking. I noticed that with the raft next to it, the lifeboat had changed directions. It was no longer perpendicular ⁶ to the waves but broadside to them and was beginning to roll from side to side, that rolling that was so unsettling for the stomach. The reason for this change became clear to me: the raft, when let out, was acting ⁷ as a sea anchor, as a drag that pulled on the lifeboat and turned its bow to face the waves. You see, waves and steady winds are usually perpendicular to each other. So, if a boat is pushed by a wind but held back by a sea anchor, it will turn until it offers the least resistance to the wind-that is, until it is in line with it and at right angles to the waves, which makes for a front-to-back pitching that is much more comfortable than a side-to-side rolling. With the raft next to the boat, the dragging effect was gone, and there was nothing to steer ⁸ the boat head into the wind. Therefore it turned broadside and rolled.,What may seem like a detail to you was something which would save my life and which Richard Parker would come to regret.,As if to confirm my fresh insight, I heard him growl ⁹. It was a disconsolate ¹⁰ growl, with something indefinably green and queasy ¹¹ in its tone. He was maybe a good swimmer, but he was not much of a sailor.,Lest I got cocky about my abilities to manipulate him, I received at that moment a quiet but sinister ¹² warning about what I was up against. It seemed Richard Parker was such a magnetic pole of life, so charismatic in his vitality ¹³, that other expressions of life found it intolerable. I was on the point of raising myself over the bow when I heard a gentle thrashing buzz. I saw something small land in the water next to me.,It was a cockroach ¹⁴. It floated for a second or two before being swallowed by an underwater mouth. Another cockroach landed in the water. In the next minute, ten or so cockroaches ¹⁵ plopped into the water on either side of the bow. Each was claimed by a fish.,The last of the foreign life forms was abandoning ship.,I carefully brought my eyes over the gunnel. The first thing I saw, lying in a fold of the tarpaulin above the bow bench, was a large cockroach, perhaps the patriarch of the clan ¹⁶. I watched it, strangely interested. When it decided ¹⁷ it was time, it deployed ¹⁸ its wings, rose in the air with a minute clattering ¹⁹, hovered ²⁰ above the lifeboat momentarily, as if making sure no one had been left behind, and then veered ²² overboard to its death.,Now we were two. In five days the populations of orang-utans, zebras, hyenas ²⁴, rats, flies and cockroaches had been wiped out. Except for the bacteria and worms that might still be alive in the remains ²⁵ of the animals, there was no other life left on the lifeboat but Richard Parker and me.,The flight to suburbia lessened the number of middle-class families living within the city. 随着迁往郊外的风行 ，住在城内的中产家庭减少了 。,The local hotel is noted for its good table.当地的那家酒店以餐食精美而著称
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